Dr Zoe Walters
University of Southampton
Awarded: £149,826.65
The challenge
Liposarcoma (LPS) is the most common soft tissue sarcoma. Treatment can include surgery, chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy however these have shown limited success. Tumour cells can avoid detection by inactivating the body’s immune system. Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that involves reactivating the immune system to destroy cancer cells. Whilst immunotherapies have shown success in some cancers, only a minority of LPS patients respond to immunotherapies, which may be in part due to a lack of understanding of how normal cells including immune cells interact with LPS cancer cells within tumours. Current laboratory models of LPS consist of tumour cells alone, making it impossible to study the interaction between tumour cells and noncancerous immune cells.
How will this project tackle this challenge?
This project will build a new model of liposarcoma which contains normal healthy immune cells as well as cancer cells to study how these different cell types interact. The team will profile the ‘immune landscape’ in LPS patient tumours obtained from surgery using a technique to identify tumour and non-tumour cells that co-exist in the patient sample. This will be used as a reference to develop models containing LPS tumour tissue grown with immune cells to mirror the interactions between tumour and immune cells, and assess responses to immunotherapies.
What this means for people affected by sarcoma
This will provide a platform to test patient response to immunotherapies and test strategies to enhance response, with the hope to move findings into clinical trials and personalised treatment.
